Silent e, Solids, Silhouette, and Soooo Excited it's Friday!

Wahoo!  It's Friday, folks!

It's time for...

Have you ever done something so completely stupid and embarrassing? Of course, you have.

Well, I was walking out of a strip mall and this step just jumped up and attacked me because the next thing you know, I am falling down and my ankle twisted in my clogs and my hand is throbbing from breaking the fall.  Now I look like this:

I'm not getting any younger, folks.

I got a Silhouette Cameo for Christmas. The first 5 days or so as I tried to learn it, I almost launched it out the window.  Wow, the learning curve with it is pretty intense.

Now I'm in loving with it and basically anything that doesn't breathe or move in my classroom and at home is being covered with vinyl.

This weekend I am going to experiment with heat vinyl transfer on T-Shirts.

Yup. It's a riveting weekend I have lined up.

I use responsive classroom in my classroom so our morning meeting consists of a morning message, greeting, group activity and sharing.

Basically, I don't do the sharing piece because I hate it we don't have enough time.  Moving on...

One of my students wanted to come up with an idea for the activity for our morning meeting. So....sure....why not?  His idea was to use some counters and have each student roll a dice and choose that many counters. I figure if they come up with their own ideas then I don't have to then they are invested.

We are working on the states of matter and we began with solids. Students received a "tool kit" with a screw, cloth, plastic triangle, wooden block, plastic tube, and wire.  Students explored the materials (miraculously, without inflicting injury) and we listed properties of each solid.

I then hung up a piece of chart paper labeled with words such as flexible, rigid, transparent, etc around the room.  Using the list of properties we made, we determined which words would fall under these categories.  For example, bends could go under "flexible" and "stiff" went under "rigid."  Students wrote the words on post-it notes and added them to the chart paper around the room.  Next week, we will compare/contrast the objects and see which categories they fall into. Is a block flexible or rigid? Transparent or colored, etc.?

We reviewed silent e this week. Students wore masks as they pretended to be "Super e" by rescuing vowels.  They used the masks to write the room by finding and writing words that contained a silent e.

How was your week? Link up with Doodlebugs Teaching and share five things about your week.